


fall

by bombcollar



Category: Hylics (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Mild Gore, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25578574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bombcollar/pseuds/bombcollar
Summary: lonely Somsnosa meets someone in the wastes.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 66





	fall

When Somsnosa asks her coworkers what they thought it meant to doze and envision shores of opaque, tongue-pink liquid, pearlescent sand and the comforting warmth of a just-absent body, they told her to lay off the fermented honeydew. What comes in unthinking thought is material only to charlatans and clergymen.

What the rift wrought from her cannot be refilled by the feel of familiar hollows, the dry acoustic of fingernail on bone. The only thing remaining of a life twisted free, the exit wound cauterized.

_Demon? We’ve never heard of such a thing. Perhaps you misremember._

She’d carved herself a place in this soft and malleable world, jointed and chitinous and unable to yield, learned to move with it. A pastel and coiled world, pale as spilt intestines. Sometimes it ran together, knowing not which direction it came from, nor where it was flowing. Words became harder to parse by the day and motions less meaningful. At least the television schedule stayed the same.

It felt as if she’d arrived in this world just in time to see its death throes. The lunar aristocracy little more than a rumor, idolatry ran rampant and fleshy horrors slunk ever more familiar around pockets of civilization. On a calm night like this she could hear their cries above the whistles and chittering and vibrato of the beasts in the paddocks.

She finds herself a companion in aphid liquor and parks outside the bunkhouse. The taste is far too sweet beneath the corpse-glow of the moon. The sky, uncommonly clear, shows the hieroglyphs of architecture upon its face. Was there anybody home? She wonders as she works the cork from the bottleneck.

As if in retort, something erupts from its surface, flung with prejudice to the earth below, just beyond the horizon. Its impact rattles the windows of the bunkhouse and sends the livestock lowing and sloshing in alarm. Somsnosa leaps to her feet, cursing and craning her head back to watch for the next strike. Perhaps whatever remained up there had finally grown sick of looking at them... But nothing further comes.

When the calling of night insects creeps back in, she starts to walk in the direction of the impact. The hard-baked earth is biting cold beneath her bare tarsi, perforated in uniform rows, ventilation for the veins beneath. Past the paddocks with their doleful eyes, their bovine drowsiness, the warning hum of electrical wires. Past the perimeter and into the wastes where feral things scuttled. Without the warm biolights of the bunkhouse, she nearly trips and falls into the crater left by whatever, whomever had been carelessly hurled into the earth. Disdainful moonlight glistens off their newly-terrestrial guest, garbed in shiny fabric, blood-blister black, lying supine several dirt layers deep.

Somsnosa skids down into the bowl of the crater and nudges them with a toe. If they were alive, they surely wouldn’t be for long, once the beasts in the waste caught the scent of their fluids. The skull he raises to her is celestial. Cratered and crowned with curved horns, and come to think of it, the moon had been full for as long as she could recall. Windex-blue blood and gobs of cheddary yellow drip from his beaten face, raining from an expression of wide-eyed shock, as if such injury was merely theory moments ago.

“…you look like total shit,” she tells him.

* * *

The night insects’ chorus drones, the wires hum, a song without melody. His fingers shake too badly to pour, but it’s just as well, they have no glasses and pass the bottle of aphid liquor between them.

Somsnosa does not ask why, or by whom. The way he stares up at the moon, as it rotates in heavenly malice, says all it needs to. He reaches out to hand her the bottle, the spout slick with the blood still sluggishly spilling from his split lip, staining the borrowed poncho she’d scavenged for him to dry his wounds. She lifts the bottle to her mouth. It tastes like saltwater.

**Author's Note:**

> previously this was titled 'instar' but as Instar is the name of a cut character, it was changed to avoid confusion.
> 
> this is written with far more deliberate and artful word choice than most of my fics in imitation of the surreal dialogue in the game, though this should at least make sense, on some level.


End file.
